


monsters of our own making

by ohmytheon



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Female!Chuck, Gen, Genderbending, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-17
Updated: 2013-11-24
Packaged: 2017-12-29 17:06:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmytheon/pseuds/ohmytheon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Looking at her father now, her father the Ranger, the Jaegar pilot, she knows that she will follow in his footsteps, but she’ll be more. She’ll be better. Instead of having to choose who to save, the daughter or the mother, she’ll save everyone. She’ll be a hero.</p><p>(A look into the life of Chuck Hansen where everything is the same - except Chuck is a girl and has so much more to prove and show the world.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Heroine's Journey

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, I was re-watching Pacific Rim for the third time with my dad and started thinking about Chuck. I love the kid, but he's pretty much a douchenozzle. And then I started to wonder how people would view Chuck's character if the gender were switched up. I feel like people would have hated Chuck's character, would have called her a complete bitch, and I would have loved it. So this is really just me playing around. I've never done a genderswap fic before so it's almost like an exercise in writing.

She was too young when her mother was taken from her.

It burns her that she does not know what her mother’s last moments were like. She imagines them all to be awful, pictures violent scenarios that no child should think of, but she can’t stop herself. It’s like a disease. When she goes to sleep, she dreams of her mother dying alone in their little house, curled under the bed, crying, pleading with anything to just let her daughter live, _please let my daughter be alive and safe, Herc save her please not me not me only her_ —

And then she snaps awake, blinks the nightmare away, and casts a glance over at her father’s sleeping form. He’s solid and still, breathing so gently that it looks as if he’s not breathing at all; and while they haven’t spoken properly for a long while, his presence is enough to calm her down.

She’ll never tell him that, though she knows that she should. Her father has soaked in a certain amount of guilt at not saving his wife, her mother, and she’s never given him the benefit of letting him know that she doesn’t blame him.

(Screams of, “I hate you!” and “I wish mum were still alive and not you!” and “You don’t understand; you’ll never bloody understand!” echo in her head as she looks at her father and she never says a damn thing before turning her eyes away from him.)

Looking at her father now, her father the Ranger, the Jaegar pilot, she knows that she will follow in his footsteps, but she’ll be more. She’ll be better. Instead of having to choose who to save, the daughter or the mother, she’ll save everyone. She’ll be a hero.

*

Hiding under her desk, clutching her backpack to her chest, she listens to the other kids in her class screaming and crying out, the teacher trying to calm them down despite being terrified herself, and the crunching of buildings and concrete and roars of the kaiju outside. Her eyes are wide, chest heaving in large gulps of air, and she looks out from underneath the desk out the window.

Then they’re running down the halls, trying to reach the basement, and she’s pushed into the wall hard by the mob of panicking children and adults. She slips into the boys’ toilet and hides in a stall, hands pressed against her ears. It’s easier this way.

Her father finds her like this. Somehow he finds her. He’s in uniform, looking like he abandoned his post for her. The first thing she realizes is his hands on her arms, calloused and rough but familiar. When she raises her head, he’s got a strangely soft look on his face. There is screaming and crying and roaring and crashing in the background, but her father gives her the same look he gave her when he showed up last minute in the back row for her first dance recital. It’s just enough to get her to open up and hold out her arms to him.

She’s small for a nine year-old yet prouder than most as well, but with a monster knocking on their doorstep, she doesn’t care if anyone sees her father carrying her like a baby.

He lifts her up easily, holding her close to his body. She wraps her arms around his neck and buries her face into his shirt, grasping him like she’s never going to let go as he runs through the halls, runs out the building, and runs runs runs until there’s fire in his lungs and legs.

*

“A Shatterdome is no place for a little girl,” is something a man tells her father one night.

Before her father can say anything, she jumps to her feet and forces the man to look her in the eyes. “I’m not a little girl,” she states matter-of-factly. “I’m going to be a Ranger.”

“Is that so?” the man asks.

“It is,” she says. “I’m going to be the best there ever is.”

She catches a glimpse of her father, just a brief one, but it’s enough to see the small smile on his face, the way he hides it from everyone in the room, including his own daughter. She sees it though. She sees it and bites her lip and looks the other man straight in the face.

“You’ve got a damn bold kid there, Herc,” the man finally says, a laugh in his voice.

“She got it from her mother,” her father replies.

(It’s the first time he’s mentioned her mother since the funeral. It’s almost enough to make her falter. Almost.)

*

People underestimate how much time she spends just watching them. She’s like a ghost in the Shatterdome, wandering around when her father and uncle are busy training with the other recruits. She takes in the way the other rangers fight, soaks in all the information she can about drifting and neural handshakes, listens to her father more than she’ll ever admit.

One day, when she’s old enough, it will be her turn and she will take it and she will fight and she will avenge her mother’s death and take away her father’s guilt and they’ll be a family again. One day.

*

She wakes up to fingers in her hair, careful and hesitant, as if they are unfamiliar with the person they are touching. As she opens her eyes and looks around in the dark, the fingers freeze, caught in the act. “Dad?”

“I’m here,” her father whispers back.

She closes her eyes, silently telling him that he can continue, and he does, stroking her dirty blond hair. Most of the time, she keeps her distance from him, even when they’re alone, a million unspoken words pushing them apart, but there are times when she craves his attention more than anything in the world and at night she’s more apt to allow him to pretend that she’s five years-old and loves him the most.

“I’m being deployed.”

Try as she might, she cannot stop herself from opening her eyes again. When she looks at her father’s figure in the dark, she sees that he’s wearing part of his uniform. It looks as if he was getting ready for battle and then realized halfway through that he hadn’t bothered to say goodbye to his child.

He looks remarkably vulnerable, his face scruffy, his eyes tired, his hand limp.

“What category?” she asks.

“Three.”

“Nothing you can’t handle then.”

He shakes his head. “No, nothing I can’t handle.”

“Remember, if you beat it in record time, I have to do laundry for a month.”

This time, her father smiles and lets her see it. “And if I don’t, I have to get you a puppy. I know, I know.” He stops suddenly, his palm flat on her head, and just looks at her, like he’s seeing her for the last time. “Catherine, you know I…”

“It’s Chuck. I told you to call me Chuck.” She rolls onto her back. “None of the boys take me seriously if you call me Catherine.”

She sees a thousand things in her father’s eyes, things that he wants to say, things that maybe one day she’ll know if they ever drift together, but he can’t get them out and she won’t force him to. _Boys are easy,_ she can hear her father telling another one of the rangers. _Her mother knew exactly what to say to her._

But he’s wrong. She has always been her father’s girl, stubborn to the core and absurdly proud and sometimes too damn difficult to deal with. Her mother would just shake her head, mutter something like, “She’s just like you, Herc,” and then smile fondly. Her mother knew exactly what to say to her because she knew exactly what to say to him. Neither of them knows what to say to anyone.

“You should go,” she tells him. “Uncle Scott is probably getting antsy waiting for you.” She turns away from him. “I’ll be up in a minute to watch the neural handshake.”

“No, no, go back to sleep.” Her father leans down for a second, like he’s going to kiss her on the head, but then he stops and stands up, walks out of the room without another word. She pulls the blanket over her head and recounts her father’s drop simulation score in her head, remembers how strong Lucky Seven has held. Everything will be fine.

*

Her father and uncle kill the kaiju in record time.

Two days later, a bulldog puppy appears on her bed with a red bow on his head anyways.

She names him Max and unabashedly shows him all the love she cannot show her father.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He throws a smirk her way. “You sure you’re ready for this?”
> 
> “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” she replies evenly.
> 
> “I thought you were just here because your daddy’s a ranger,” the boy says, “a free ride into the Academy.”
> 
> At this, she tightens her grip on the hanbō, her lips thinning and her eyes flashing furiously. She wants to rage at him, fly off the handle like she has done before when she’s challenged like this, but she takes one glance at the Marshall at the side of the room and holds herself back. This is her moment. She’s not going to let some American punk ruin it for her.

By the time she’s thirteen, she has grown far too wise with the way of the men in the Shatterdomes. She watches them, sees the way they act when the cameras are rolling and a pretty reporter is asking questions. Even worse is when they all go out for something as simple as dinner. Something like that is a luxury, according to her father, but many of the male jaeger pilots do everything in their power to charm their way into some poor star-struck girl’s life for a night.

It doesn’t surprise her, their behavior, not really. Her Uncle Scott has been this way as long as she can remember, even before he became a jaeger pilot alongside her father. She’ll cast a glance over her comics at her uncle, watching him flirt outrageously with a female mechanic. The girl is cute enough, but she’s new to the place and naïve to Scott’s ways. She should know better. Almost all jaeger pilots are the same.

After Scott sends the girl away, he swaggers over towards his niece, a grin on his face. She rolls her eyes back down to the comic. “Another notch on the bedpost then, Uncle?” she drawls. “I thought you knew better than to fuck around with the mechanics, lest they try to sabotage you again.”

Scott plops down next to her on the bench. “You should know better than to talk like that. Your father still wants to pretend that you think babies come from storks.”

“A bit difficult to not learn about sex when someone keeps barging into my bedroom, mistaking it for theirs, while nacking on a new Jaegar Fly every weekend.”

Her uncle laughs. He’s always been much quicker to laugh and joke around than her father, the lighter of the two. When her father couldn’t, he’d take her to football games or out to see a film. She loves her uncle dearly, but much like her father, she can’t help but get frustrated by him as well.

“Keep that serious attitude on you,” her uncle tells her. “Your father would be more than happy to see you with some normal job, far away from a Shatterdome and kaiju and all these boys in here, but I’m fairly certain you’re more interested in getting in a jaeger than ever letting a boy get in you.”

She wrinkles up her nose and swats him with the comic. “That’s revolting.”

“Darling, that’s life,” her uncle says.

“Becoming a ranger is my life,” she reminds him.

Her uncle just sighs. “You can have both, trust me. When you get older, you’ll want to take advantage of all the perks that comes with being a jaeger pilot – and I do mean take advantage.”

*

“I don’t know why you’re so bothered with the idea of me enlisting in the Jaeger Academy. I’m fifteen. I can do this! I was meant to do this!”

“Why? There are so many other things you could do. You could get out of here. You could get away from this.”

“You wouldn’t be so against the idea of me joining the Academy if I was a boy. Just say it, c’mon. You don’t want me to be a ranger because I’m a girl.”

“That’s not true–”

“It is! I know it is! Yeah, there are more male jaeger pilots than female pilots. So what? I wanted to join the air force for as long as I could remember, just like you, and then when the kaiju attacks started and you and Uncle Scott joined the PPDC… You raised me in this life. And you expect me to want something else?”

“Listen to me; all I want for you is to be safe!”

“What about happy? What about what I want?”

“Catherine, please…”

“It’s Chuck! Hell, Dad, it’s like you don’t even know me.” A pause. The looks passed between them shows a crack in their anger, briefly allowing the pain to seep through, but then she closes the wound as quickly as it opened. “I’m doing this, whether you like it or not. I’m becoming a jaeger pilot.”

*

Tilting her head to the side, she watches the boy in front of her size her up. He is two years older than her and also has considerable more weight and muscle on her. He is cocky, but not for the right reasons. The stupid boy, would-be man, attempting-to-be jaeger pilot, thinks he’s better than her, because she’s a girl and he’s a boy.

He throws a smirk her way. “You sure you’re ready for this?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” she replies evenly.

“I thought you were just here because your daddy’s a ranger,” the boy says, “a free ride into the Academy.”

At this, she tightens her grip on the hanbō, her lips thinning and her eyes flashing furiously. She wants to rage at him, fly off the handle like she has done before when she’s challenged like this, but she takes one glance at the Marshall at the side of the room and holds herself back. This is her moment. She’s not going to let some American punk ruin it for her.

“Look at yourself,” the boy laughs. “You can’t even say anything because it’s true. Why don’t you run back to your room and cry over a bucket of ice–?”

She doesn’t wait for him to finish. Instead she attacks, rushing forward, silent and flooded with fury. The boy tries to react, but she darts to his left at the last second and sweeps the hanbō underneath him, hitting the back of his calves and knocking him onto his back. She presses one knee into his chest, pushing down harder than necessary, and points the edge of the hanbō at his face.

A look of shock and humiliation, a look that doesn’t speak of anger but hides it well enough, is spread on his face. She knows that she has wounded more than just his backside though and that in itself is enough to make her feel victorious. “Maybe you should take a ride out of this Academy. If you’re going to get your arse kicked by a little girl, then how the hell are you going to handle yourself against a kaiju?”

She pulls herself back to her feet and throws the hanbō at the boy, making him flinch. After taking one glance at the Marshall, she turns her attention back to the boy and smirks at him, the same smirk he gave her moments ago. It is a smirk that she will carry with her for the rest of her days, a show that she will put on so that the rest of the world will know just how confident she is in herself. She turns on her heels and walks out of the Kwoon Combat Room, the mob of trainees parting like a sea for her to walk through.

This is who she is and she will be a force to be reckoned with.

*

Her days are spent in a cramped school, her counting down the seconds until she can leaves. She’s spent years trying to convince her father to allow her to be home-schooled (or rather, Shatterdome-schooled), but he refuses. _“You need some normalcy in your life,”_ he always tells her.

All she wants to do is scream at him every single time he says this to her. There is no such thing as normalcy anymore, not when it is normal for giant alien monsters from another universe to come out of some portal dimension in the bottom of the ocean. Instead she turns on her heels and storms back to her bedroom, the little metal box of her own that her father was able to get her when she turned eleven. She’ll cling to Max, press her wet face into his wrinkling skin, and angrily mutter all the things she hates about her father.

(She doesn’t mean them, not really.)

But this school isn’t meant for her. A normal life like this isn’t meant for her. Nearly everyone has suffered losses from the kaiju, so it’s not like she’s special for having lost her mother. There are even a few other kids at her school with relatives in the Jaeger Program, so even that doesn’t make her special. But none of them have a fire burning in them like she does. None of them break pencils from grasping them so tightly whenever they think about the collision of a jaeger’s fist with a kaiju’s face. None of them know what it’s like to feel the urge to kill, destroy, burn burn every kaiju and the Breach down to the point where they can’t even think about simple math.

She feels smothered by her readings, like she’s drowning in this stupid, boring life. She can’t stand any of the gossip that she’s forced to listen to and pretend to care about. There are days when she feels like punching the girl in front of her in her math class just for talking about the boy she likes. Who can care about things like that when the world is slowly coming to an end? Can’t they understand that?

Even worse is when she catches other kids talking about her or when they straight up tease her. She never tells her father about this, not ever, because maybe then he’ll pull her out of the school, but only in an attempt to shield her from some other hurt. And she can’t handle that, her father’s overpowering and controlling need to protect her from every little thing out there, like she’s still that nine year-old girl he carried out of the school as his wife died.

“Hey there, Jaeger Freak,” a girl named Andrea says by way of greeting. Andrea is more than pretty with her bright, straight blond hair, shiny white teeth, clear fair skin, thin athletic body, and lovely green eyes.

Oh, how more than anything she’d like to destroy that too.

“Hello, Andrea.” She doesn’t look back at the other girl or the gaggle of girls that flank her. Boys and even the few other girls in the Shatterdome in the Kwoon, she can deal with. Kaiju, she can get behind. But other girls her age and their obsession with drama? She doesn’t get them at all. This is only year nine. How can they already be so vile and pointless? She knows how to take down a boy nearly twice her size, but she can’t exactly knock Andrea flat on her back in the middle of the hallway.

“We were just wondering, you know, out of concern for you” – at this, Andrea looks back at her friends and they all giggle, clearly showing proper concern – “if you were going to the dance.”

She turns her head around and looks at each girl for a brief second. They all have straight faces on, but barely. She can see the cracks in their expressions, their lips twitching into would-be smiles, their inability to look her in the eyes, the silent mocking laughs. When she finally turns her attention to Andrea, the leader of this mob of sycophantic girls, she sees that Andrea is actually wearing a concerned look, but it’s over the top and meant to be so. This girl wants to look like she cares, but she also wants her target to know that she doesn’t.

Because that’s what she is: a target. But she’s not about to be a victim.

“No, I’m not going to the dance,” she evenly responds.

“Really?” Andrea says. “Is it because you don’t have a date? Because I hear Joel doesn’t have a date either; and I’m sure, if I ask him, he’ll stoop down to your level and ask you.”

“Thanks, but I’m not going,” she repeats. “I’m busy.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Andrea says, “too busy tinkering with your giant robots and pretending to fight monsters. How do you ever expect to get a boyfriend if you’re too bothered being a nerd.”

She closes her eyes. Deep breath. Relax. _Don’t let this get to you._ When she opens her eyes, she clutches her books against her chest and smiles. “In the future, when you’re out on a corner trying to make money, you’ll be thanking me for saving your pathetic excuse of a life when I’m piloting a jaeger and fighting against kaiju.”

Andrea’s face turns ugly and dark while the rest of her friends gasp in the background. “Why you little–”

“Careful now, Andrea,” she says quietly, stepping so close that their faces are just inches away. “I spend my free time as a nerd training in hand-to-hand combat. I’m almost certain all you do with your hands are file your nails and give out free hand jobs.”

With that, she steps back, shuts her locker, and then walks away. Finally, school makes a little more sense.

Andrea never bothers her again.

*

“She’s a spitfire, your daughter,” another ranger tells her father.

“You must be beating those boys in training away from her,” his co-pilot adds.

Her father gives a somewhat exasperated looks and stabs at his food. “She does that plenty enough on her own in the Kwoon.”

She wants to remind them that she enlisted in the Jaeger Academy to learn how to pilot jaegers and to fight kaiju, to protect people, not to play around with boys. She wants to point out that just because she’s attractive does not mean that she spends all her time flirting. Hell, she wants to tell them that maybe it’s not just boys they should be concerned about. But she bites her tongue, almost to the point of making it bleed, and keeps her eyes down.

“C’mon, you can’t tell me it’s all work and no play,” the first ranger says, elbowing her slightly. “I remember being in training. The best way to blow off steam was–”

The glower on her father’s face is enough to hush the young man up and he and his co-pilot grin sheepishly at each other. She’s fifteen years-old, definitely not the most innocent girl in the world, but she’s still her father’s daughter, no matter how many cracks there are in their relationship. She’s almost fairly certain that her father would rather talk about her mother than sex.

She pushes her plate away and stands up.“Permission to leave, sir?”

Her father nods his head. She rubs Max’s head and pats her leg, motioning for him to follow her back to her quarters. She’s grown tired of these men and their simple ways. Jaeger pilots were supposed to be brilliant, weren’t they? More and more of them acted as silly as her Uncle Scott though.

“You’re just lucky all she cares about is being a jaeger pilot,” the second ranger says. “All my daughter can talk about are boys and I’m not there all the time to warn them away. Your girl is surrounded by them and it’s like she doesn’t even see them.”

“She just has other things on her mind right now,” her father replies. “I was the same way about the Air Force until I met her mother.”

But it’s more than that. Being a ranger is the only thing in the world that she can think about, the only thing that keeps her grounded and keeps her sane, the one thing she holds onto when she feels the black hole gaping between her and her father growing and that piece of her life missing that reminds her so much of her mother. She doesn’t want some normal life where she calls her friends up to chat about boys. Hell, she doesn’t even really want friends. She doesn’t have the time nor the luxury of those things, not with a war going on and a debt to settle.

*

Her nights are spent chasing after Max throughout the Shatterdome. When she’s not reviewing every fighting technique and stance, when she’s not looking through tapes of kaiju attacks, when she’s not memorizing every bit of jaeger tech in the Conn-Pad, she spends whatever free time she has with her best friend. There are kids her age, all boys, but she keeps her distance from them.

(“How are you expected to find someone with Drift compatibility if you never spend any time with them?” Her father’s voice rings in her head whenever she tries to decide where to sit in the chum hall – with the other teenagers or with her family or on her own.)

And so she runs through the halls, half to keep in shape and the other half to keep Max entertained. She loves the wrinkly little pup with all her heart. He’s got a few years on him now, but he’ll always be a pup to her. Sometimes she chases him and other times he chases her, laughter bouncing off of the metal walls.

More often than not, her father is busy training with the other jaeger pilots, but there is one night as she runs back into her bedroom with Max bouncing after her that she actually crashes into her father.

“Dad.” She blinks, breathing heavily, and runs her hands through her hair. “I was just–”

“I know what you’re doing,” her father says. For a minute, she’s afraid that she’s about to get chewed out for not being a responsible adult, for not acting accordingly, but then a smile breaks out onto his face. He doesn’t say anything. He just places his hand on her shoulder, pats it once, and then walks out of the room. When she was younger, right before she’d told him of her decision to join the Academy, he always pat her on the head.

He doesn’t do that anymore. (She misses it.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But her heart is thumping wildly and her throat is constricting and her hands are shaking for the first time ever as she looks at her uncle now. There’s a strange gleam in his eyes, like he’s looking at her but not seeing her. She’s never seen him like this before and it fucking terrifies her. He’s looking at her like she’s a threat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always been curious as to what exactly Herc saw in the Drift that disturbed him so much that it made him report his own brother, his copilot, and get Scott tossed out of the PPDC. I feel like most of the time, many offenses that warrant punishment are pushed to the side in the military. It'd be especially the case if the world depended on these jaeger pilots for their prized skills. There's a lot of speculation. I really think it was a culmination of things that Herc just couldn't ignore any longer. This is most certainly a very incorrect scene, but just something I came up with. So, without further, ado...

“Dad?”

She nudges the door open, not bothering to knock, and peers inside. At first, she doesn’t see anyone, but then spots that the bathroom light is on. Gently shutting the door behind herself, she tiptoes towards the bathroom.

It’s not often that she asks her father permission to leave the Shatterdome, but he’ll be happy about it, no matter how much shit he might give her since she has training early in the morning. The idea of her having any sort of social life outside of the Academy brightens his day, especially when both of them know that a kaiju attack is likely to occur sooner than later.

When she catches a glimpse of a figure in the bathroom, she stands up straight, like a soldier. “Dad–”

But the man that turns on his heels suddenly is not her father. It’s her Uncle Scott.

“Oh, hey there, Chuck.” Scott smiles at her in a rather jerky manner and wipes quickly at his nose, sniffing like he has a cold. She stands very still, giving him a wary look, even as he steps out of the bathroom towards her. “I, uh, I didn’t hear you come in.”

She furrowed her brow. “Where’s my father?”

“Your dad?” Scott glances around the room, as if the man is going to pop up out of nowhere at the mere mention of his name like some sort of demon. “He’s with Stacker.”

She holds her ground even though her uncle is standing right in front of her. Every inch of her mind is screaming for her to turn on her heels and run out the door. There’s a fire under her feet, licking at her fingertips, but still she does not move.  She’s never been afraid of anything in her life except for the kaiju that took her mother. In a way, it felt like all the fear she had left in her was left behind in her destroyed school the moment her father picked her up and carried her to safety, to this new life. And she most certainly has never been afraid of her uncle, ridiculous Scott, caring Scott, manwhore Scott. He’s always been unfailingly kind whenever her father was unable to be.

But her heart is thumping wildly and her throat is constricting and her hands are shaking for the first time ever as she looks at her uncle now. There’s a strange gleam in his eyes, like he’s looking at her but not seeing _her_. She’s never seen him like this before and it fucking terrifies her. He’s looking at her like she’s a threat.

“What are you doing in here then?” She has to force the words to come out, each one clinging to her tongue like they don’t want to be spoken. She can’t stop her brain though. It’s running a thousand miles per hour and she just has to know why her uncle is pale and sweaty and looking a little more rough for wear.

“Forgot something.” He glances away, looking for something that both of them know doesn’t exist.

“What could you have possibly forgotten in here? This is my father’s room. You have your own.”

“Don’t you have other things to do? Simulations to prepare for, jaeger tech to review…”

She doesn’t even blink and digs her heels in hard. “What are you doing in here, Scott?” This time there is an edge to her tone, one that her uncle catches instantly. It’s the same tone her father uses on him whenever they’re out and about and Scott’s acting like a right pain in the arse.

He tilts his head, the strange look in his eyes growing wilder. “I don’t think that’s any of your business, Catherine.”

It takes everything in her not to snarl at her uncle, who has never called her by her real name since she abandoned it, but she snaps instead, “Like hell it isn’t. You look like shit and you’re acting sketchy as hell. A kaiju could attack at any given moment, so I’d like to know that the man copiloting a jaeger with my father is not fucking losing it.” She looked him more closely in the face. “Are you sick or something?”

“I’m fine. I–”

When he turns his head slightly, light from the toilet hits his face and she spots something off.

“What’s that on your face?” A warning bell rings loudly in her head and she’s telling herself that she’s wrong. This is ridiculous. This can’t be happening. Her uncle can be stupid, but he’s not that dumb.

Scott wipes at his nose and sniffs again, turning away from her. “It’s nothing. Shaving cream.”

“Shaving cream–?” Her voice is a little hysterical and she’s really trying to be calm, but now that the ball is rolling around in her head she can’t get it to stop. “Are you taking drugs?” He freezes and just stares back at her, says nothing, his face hidden in shadow again. Her heart’s in her throat, nearly choking her, but she says again, “Are you fucking taking drugs?”

Something in his body shifts and he slumps a little. “They help me focus–”

And something inside her mind explodes. “What the living fuck! Uncle Scott, what the hell is your problem? You can’t fucking do drugs when you’re piloting a jaeger. Do you know what kind of side effects that could have on the Drift? Not to mention a kaiju alert could happen at any time and you could be fucked up and-and–”

She’s always been in shape, even as a kid, always played sports and did dance. She can run a mile in under five minutes. She’ll spar in the Kwoon Combat Room until she can barely see straight. But for brief moment, she can’t breathe and it feels like her lungs are caving in on her, deflating in her chest, and she’s having an asthma attack.

This is her uncle. This is Scott. This is her father’s brother. Her father’s copilot. Her father’s bloody copilot whom he trusts to work with him and help keep him alive and bring him back home, to her, to his daughter. Her uncle wouldn’t possibly do something as stupid and ridiculous as take drugs when he operates a giant robot for a living to protect and save the world from monsters.

Would he?

“Why?” she whimpers; and she hates herself for it, hates herself for sounding so weak and vulnerable, if only for a moment. But this is her uncle jeopardizing her father’s life; and they may not have properly spoken to each other in a while, but it’s her _father_ and she loves him, she really does. “Why would you do something as thick as this?”

“I told you; they help me focus, keep my head in the game,” Scott tells her. She doesn’t care though. He could tell her that they improve his fighting skills and she still wouldn’t care. “Chuck, this world is fucked. You know it. Your father knows it. Every fucking person knows it. But we keep fighting in these goddamn ridiculous robots, like it’s going to stop something, but it doesn’t. And it’s to the point where it’s all I can think about. I need to focus. I need to remember what I’m doing here and they…they help.”

She just shakes her head though, mumbling, “No, no, no,” under her breath, her eyes looking at everywhere but him. She can’t bear to look at him, not right now, not when he’s like this. Her heart aches in her chest and she feels a pained moan building up inside of her.

“They help,” Scott reiterates.

She searches the room for a reason to believe him. It doesn’t come to her. “Does Dad know?”

Her uncle doesn’t say a word.

She connects eyes with him.

In an instant, when she’s in the middle of turning on her heels to rush out the door, her uncle is on top of her, shoving her into the wall with one hand and slamming the door shut to the door with his other. Before she can get a grip on him, he’s got his forearm pressed against her throat, holding her there even as she kicks at his legs and digs her nails into the sleeve of his arm. She’s been able to take out opponents much bigger than her with ease, but her uncle still outweighs her, is still stronger than her, is still more skilled in combat than she is at this point. Tears prick at her eyes immediately, but she refuses them and continues to struggle.

“Uncle Scott–” Her voice is pleading, raspy and scared and so very childish. God, she hates it.

“Don’t you fucking tell him,” her uncle growls at her, his face close to hers. In the dark with the light of the bathroom hitting him from behind, he looks like a ghoul, like he’s been transformed into a monster from one of those scary movies she’d watched as a little kid with her dad. “Don’t you fucking breathe a word.”

She never stops fighting against him. She goes to hit him in the face, but he catches her wrist with his free one. After a bit more struggling, he manages to grasp her other wrist and shoves them painfully into her gut. She’s so much smaller than him. He and her father are roughly the same size, but she’s never once considered the fact that she’s still just a child compared to them. The fact that she’s helpless reminds her suddenly of how she’d felt when she was nine and hiding in the toilet and thinking of how tiny and pathetic she must have been to the kaiju ripping through Sydney. It’s almost enough to suck the life out of her right then and there.

“How do you expect to hide it from him?” she demands, hot tears sliding out of her eyes despite herself. “You can’t hide things in the Drift.”

“There are tricks you learn,” Scott says, not sounding like her uncle at all. Who is this beast?  “If I don’t want your father to know, I don’t let him see. This is going to remain our little secret. Do you understand?”

“You can’t hide things in the Drift,” she repeats. “It’ll find a way to come out; and then he’ll know. He’ll know everything and you know what he’ll do.”

At this, Scott smirks, and there’s something so awful about it. She’s seen him smirk before. He does it all the time when he’s with a pretty girl, when he’s surrounded by people he considers malleable and easy to manipulate. It only takes her a second to realize that despite being his niece, his blood, she’s still just another woman in her uncle’s eyes, someone he can influence to do whatever he wants.

“He won’t do a damn thing,” he tells her in a confident tone, “because the world is ending and the kaiju took away the love of his life and are threatening his daughter. He doesn’t have a choice but to ignore anything that makes him uncomfortable because we’re a team, we’re fighters, we’re rangers. You don’t get to choose who you’re Drift compatible with.”

“He could be Drift compatible with others,” she insists.

“But no one like me,” Scott reminds her. “He’ll choose protecting you over anything else, even himself and the PPDC.” He pulls his arm away from her throat slowly, allowing her to suck in air and fill her lungs. She breathes in greedily, desperate to feel whole again. “So let’s not make him uncomfortable. Neither of us wants your father to feel conflicted or distracted. It’ll leave him open to…suffering. That’s why we’re never going to breathe a word about this, are we?”

She doesn’t say anything at first. She _can’t_ say anything. She just stares into Scott’s eyes, the same eyes that she and her father have, but they look completely different now. He doesn’t look like her uncle anymore; feel like him, sound like him, even smell like him. He’s something else entirely and it makes her want to wretch.

“ _Are we_?” Scott grounds out, firm and yet somehow…alluring as well, like she really can’t help but agree with him. His way is the only way.

She bites her lips, shakes her head, and drops her eyes to their feet.

“Now then, doesn’t that feel better?” Scott sighs and pulls the weight of his body from hers. She slumps against the wall, her legs shaking underneath her. He smiles at her in a manner that conveys love and concern. When he reaches out and tucks a strand of her dirty blonde hair behind her ear, she flinches away from him, but he doesn’t pull back. He holds that strand and gives her a careful look over with his head titled. “You’re a bright girl, Chuck, always have been.”

And then he opens the door and sweeps out of the room, leaving her feeling worn down and used.

 _This is how those jaeger fly girls must feel after he’s done with them,_ she can’t help but think deliriously. Her knees buckle and she slides down the wall until she’s curled up in a ball on the floor, the weight of what has just happened pressing down on her like a sheet of metal.

The silence bears down on her, the darkness cloaking her in a cold air. She doesn’t notice that she’s sweating or how fast her heart is racing or how she can’t even find it in herself to think of Max. All she can think about is Scott and how suddenly the kaiju aren’t the monsters in her mind anymore.

_There are tricks you learn._

She presses her hands against her face and wills herself not to cry.


End file.
